Andy Markovits & Heiko Beyer on "The long-standing interaction between anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism"

My good friend Andy Markovits
has written an important, engaging, and eye-opening book on the complex
and tricky subject of European anti-Americanism. The main focus is on
its current forms and transformations, but he also puts these in a
larger historical perspective. [....] The book is valuable and
illuminating as well as absorbing (and highly readable), and I recommend
it to everyone.

Markovits's arguments are also likely to be controversial–but many of
the reasons only help to explain why this is a book that needed to be
written. [....]

=> One of subjects explored in Uncouth Nation
is the frequent tendency for various types of anti-Americanism, ranging
from "right" to "left" and along various cultural and ideological
tangents, to be linked to various types of anti-semitism. (Over the
past half-century, that has often involved links to both anti-Zionism
and anti-semitism, two phenomena that I would describe as not precisely identical but obviously overlapping and interwoven.)

Unfortunately, that subject remains timely and important. It is further
explored and updated in an excellent piece that Andy Markovits and
Heiko Beyer just published in Tablet Magazine. Their
analysis is sufficiently wide-ranging, substantial, and illuminating
that I won't try to summarize it. But here is their concluding paragraph::

The myth that Jews, helped by their American masters or servants, rule
the world never disappeared. It merely lay dormant for a few decades in
the aftermath of the Holocaust, thus deviating from the norm of having
anti-Semitism be an integral and accepted part of public discourse.
Alas, there are many signs that the threshold of shame concerning
anti-Semitism has been substantially lowered. And its consistent link to
anti-Americanism makes this lowering so much easier and more socially
acceptable. Anti-Semitism’s association with America and thus to
ultimate power, makes invoking it an antinomian act of speaking truth to
power, which, in many circles on both sides of the Atlantic, is
inherently a good thing.

(For one classic non-European example of that last point, which helps illustrate the ways in which anti-semitic conspiracy theories originally developed in Europe have gone world-wide, see here.)

Graffito like the one appearing one morning just across the street from
the apartment in a left-leaning so-called alternative neighborhood in
Leipzig, “Fick Israel—Fick die U.S.A” is certainly no surprise for those
who consider themselves part of the left. Anti-Zionism has been an
endemic marker for the global left since 1967 as has its ideological
companion, anti-Americanism. Both sentiments have become core
characteristics of what it means to be left in liberal advanced
capitalist democracies.

Unlike other prejudices, anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism are
considered not only acceptable but in fact de rigueur for large parts of
the global left because both denounce the rich and mighty, with Israel
represented as the main satellite of U.S. imperialism. Both of these
beliefs are positioned as speaking truth to power. In her important book
Das unsichtbare Vorurteil (The Invisible Prejudice) which deals
with anti-Semitism among the U.S. left after Sept. 11, Sina Arnold
demonstrates that this is not just a narrative popular in Europe but
also widespread among American progressives—which is not surprising
since the latter almost by definition are highly critical of U.S.
foreign policy.

Lest there be any misunderstandings: Being anti-Trump is not being
anti-American! When we use the term anti-Americanism we mean an
all-encompassing resentment not a mere opposition to a specific
administration or policy. Opposing Trump’s very being, resisting his
policies every step of the way is not anti-American. Indeed, it often in
fact is based on the same American values that anti-Americanism
denounces: plurality, minority rights, and public liberty.

Opposing American policies does not constitute anti-Americanism.
Disliking what America does is not anti-American. But having an
all-encompassing antipathy for what America is, does in fact represent
anti-Americanism.

Anti-Americanism refers to a deeper presence of negative attitudes
against all things American, a point of view, a state of mind that
though occasionally dormant has never been moribund in European opinion
of America and Americans since its first manifestations among 18th
century naturalists. Paul Hollander’s definition of anti-Americanism
appears quite useful to clarify our approach: “Anti-Americanism is a predisposition to hostility
[emphasis in the original] toward the United States and American
society, a relentless critical impulse toward American social, economic,
and political institutions, traditions, and values; it entails an
aversion to American culture in particular and its influence abroad,
often also contempt for the American national character … and dislike of
American people, manners, behavior, dress …; a firm belief in the
malignity of American influence and presence anywhere in the world.”

Take the German word Amerikanisierung for example, which was
introduced into the German dictionary during the heydays of the
intelligentsia’s culturally pessimistic anti-Americanism at the turn
from the 19th to the 20th century, as was its French counterpart américanisation.
Until today, whenever used, in the most varied of contexts (sports,
language, education, criminality, culture, etc.) terms like Amerikanisierung and américanisation invariably imply a phenomenon’s cheapening and loss of authenticity as in the Amerikanisierung of soccer, of food, of music, of language, of whatever. Américanisation
also entails a corrosive dimension, something that ruins an item’s and
context’s original bliss and genuineness. In addition, there is a sense
of inevitability to this process, a kind of helplessness befalling the
victims of Americanization, a loss of agency in the face of this
all-powerful onslaught that breeds resentment. This same mindset
pertains to anti-Semitism as well. Jews, just like Americans, are also
seen as corrosive, as undermining an entity’s authenticity, as
subverting its original purity. Both Jews and Americans are deemed to be
particularly powerful even though they are almost always considered
culturally inferior and somehow artificial, most assuredly inauthentic.

The attribution of an almost-limitless power to the United States
constitutes one of the key links between anti-Americanism and
anti-Zionism. Israel is perceived as an American outpost, the sole
Goliath in the Middle East (somehow other regional powers like Iran and
Saudi Arabia have never been subjected to anywhere near the opprobrium
that Israel has received in the past 50 years), against whom the
Palestinian David is desperately and honorably taking a stand. At the
same time, the notion of unlimited power attributed to the United States
reveals another dimension: the affinity of anti-American conspiracy
theories with anti-Semitic narratives.

***

Although it is hard to tell whether today’s anti-Americanism in some
parts of the world derives from anti-Semitic beliefs or the other way
around, it is obvious that the tale of Jewish power and conspiracy has
been around both before the United States attained its global power that
it has wielded since the end of World War II, and before Israel was
founded. Well before Wilhelm Marr’s coinage of the term anti-Semitism in
1879, the view of the almighty, evil, devious Jew whose ways, indeed
whose very being, comprises the essence of corrosion, had been alive and
well in European discourse for centuries. Jews have long been viewed as
corrosive agents that stealthily but all the more successfully dissolve
the authentic fabric of a traditional collective, most eminently that
of a nation since the 19th century, or in its much more primordial and
ethnocentric manifestation the Volk.

European intellectuals of the right and the left have accorded America a
similarly corrosive power that, not by chance, they see as strongly
related to that of the Jews, as depicted in conspiracy theories like the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In Egypt, for example, the 41
episodes of the show “Horseman Without a Horse” in which the hero
discovers a secret document written in Russian and describing a Jewish
world conspiracy, were shown during Ramadan in 2002 by various
television stations. Right-wing extremists in Russia, Europe, and
America have reprinted the Protocols repeatedly, and the boom of
esoteric and populist conspiracy theories has been accompanied by many
articles and books featuring variations on the Protocols’ leitmotif.

Neo-Nazi views still represent perhaps the most overt manifestations of
anti-Semitism as well as its relationship with anti-Americanism. In a
recent article the University of Cambridge historian Brendan Simms
showed that Hitler’s anti-Americanism was sharpened by his experience of
American troops being the decisive force in defeating Wilhelmine
Germany in WWI. Simms argues that this deep-seated anti-American
resentment propelled Hitler to become the lethal anti-Semite that he
turned out to be. It was therefore Hitler’s anti-Americanism that led to
his anti-Semitism, rather than his days in fin de siècle Vienna in
which he first encountered real live Jews and where he also failed to
gain entrance to that city’s arts academy.

While we are swayed by Simms’ impressive evidence and novel
interpretation, we still believe that it remains unclear, even in
Hitler’s case, whether anti-Americanism constitutes the source for
anti-Semitism or whether it is vice versa. In fact both narratives—“the
Jews use America to rule the world,” and “America uses the Jews and
Israel” to do the same—have been manifest for a long time, and
complement each other. Symptomatic on the extreme right is the Nazi
ideologist Giselher Wirsing’s 1941 elaboration in Der maßlose Kontinent
(The Excessive Continent) that “The lodges [were] the collecting tank
of Jewish power within the U.S. gradually growing beneath the surface.”

The belief that it is the other way around, and that the United States
uses Israel to secure and expand its global domination, is a core
element of the Marxist-Leninist catechism as Thomas Haury in his 2002
book Antisemitismus von links (Anti-Semitism From Left) argues
so convincingly. However, often this anti-American anti-Zionism
backfires when leftist groups find themselves in uncomfortably full
agreement with the far right in arguing that Jews have “too much power”
in the United States. Then again, it is particularly on issues of
America and Jews/Israel in which the antipathies of the far left and far
right often meet each other in happy harmony.

Yet the alignment of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism, in its varied
manifestations, is much older than Nazism or theories of imperialism. It
can be found as early as the second half of the 19th century when
anti-Semitism became a social movement in Europe. Just think of the
Dreyfus Affair in France or the rise of political anti-Semitism in Karl
Lueger’s Vienna: It was during that time when Jewishness and Americanism
became synonyms of modernity and liberalism which, as many feared,
would destroy Europe’s authenticity.

Jews and America back then were already identified with essential
economic, political, and cultural institutions and ingredients that
constituted the essence of capitalist modernity. Money, commerce, banks,
stock markets, and materialism came to be associated with an almighty
Jewish and/or American influence. The complexity of modernity is here
reduced through a personification of capitalism and facile conspiracy
theories. In a way both resentments fulfill a shared function: to
rationalize an increasingly complex world by denouncing a small group of
people working behind the scenes to design the world at their will.
Until today the combination of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism offers
a much-needed and seemingly robust explanation of such abstract,
complex and scary phenomena as modernization, urbanization,
globalization, or (neo)liberalism first by declaring Washington, Wall
Street, and Hollywood as the control centers of the world only to add
that the Jews call the shots in these places often using the code word
East Coast (oddly never West Coast) in this context.

Rather than dealing with capitalism as a profoundly international—indeed
a-national—construct which it so clearly is, it is commonplace for many
on the German left (not least important voices in the Social Democratic
Party and the country’s most powerful trade union, IG Metall) to
mitigate capitalism’s ills by assigning its particularly rapacious
characteristics solely to an Anglo-American (sotto voce Jewish)
casino version that operates in stark contrast to the more humane and
local German one often labelled Rhenish capitalism.

Jesper Gulddal has collected many expressions of anti-Americanism in
19th-century European literature in which a diversity of authors from
France, Britain, and Germany (Gulddal’s countries of analysis) argued
emphatically that America’s lack of tradition and culture, as well as
its materialism, vulgarity, religious bigotry, and political immaturity
constituted not only the essence of this country’s very being but that
they would also somehow infest Europe. Gulddal’s work confirms the
finding that conceptually speaking, there exists no country-specific
anti-Americanism but that this phenomenon’s characteristics exist in
identical forms in all European countries. To be sure, Tory
anti-Americanism in Britain of the 1930s and 1940s was clearly a lot
less pronounced and acute than that of the Nazis in Germany at the same
time; but the constituent characteristics of the beliefs in both places
were virtually identical. Indeed, even a cursory reading of Philippe
Roger’s superb book The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism
demonstrates how all the tropes identifying anti-Americanism in
Germany play an equally crucial role in its French variant. Parallel
scholarship on anti-Americanism in Spain such as Alessandro Seregni’s
excellent El antiamericanismo español confirms this continent-wide pattern.

Though not part of Gulddal’s work, the same shared intercountry
characteristics pertain also to anti-Semitism where the acuity of its
manifestation varies by geographic location and era but where its
essential characteristics are identical over time and place. The
negative traits associated with Americans that Gulddal’s study brings to
light have similarly been ascribed to Jews who have long been depicted
as greedy, money-obsessed, urban, rootless, devious and
culture-deprived. Plus, Jews were already considered to rule America and
to be responsible for the vulgarity of American culture and the
ruthlessness of its policies. If there were such a thing as a Jewish
state in the 19th century, for many Europeans this was the United
States. This impression persisted in Germany as well as France
throughout the 1920s when President Woodrow Wilson, a Presbyterian, was
portrayed as an agent of Jewish capital. And the widely used term Jew
York hardly needs much explanation. Ditto the commonplace in much
European right-wing discourse of Franklin Delano Roosevelt being a Jew
by dint of his name’s similarity to Rosenfeld. The Norwegian writer Knut
Hamsun, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1920, firmly
believed that the linkage of Jews and America constituted the prime evil
of the modern world.

After the Holocaust, the overt articulation of anti-Semitism became
unacceptable in Western societies, thus marginalizing the ideological
amalgam of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism as a marker of the equally
unacceptable far right. But the Six-Day War of 1967 changed everything.
Jews were no longer perceived as victims of the Holocaust but as
victimizers of the Palestinians.

In an otherwise immensely commendable, because profoundly democratizing,
growth of the discourse of compassion for the disempowered that came to
dominate liberal culture in the West, especially since the late 1960s,
Israel’s and America’s power became the two main enemies of world peace.
Worse, they mutated into fascist states not only for the radical left
but also for the bourgeois antiwar movements throughout Europe.
Denouncing Israel and America became bon ton around Europe’s
left-liberal dinner tables. In a 2007 review of Markovits’ Uncouth
Nation titled “Love to Hate You,”
Mary Fitzgerald commences her piece with a lengthy quote of the
well-known British writer Margaret Drabble: “‘My anti-Americanism has
become almost uncontrollable,’ wrote Margaret Drabble in May 2003, two
months after the invasion of Iraq. ‘It has possessed me like a disease.
It rises in my throat like acid reflux. … I can’t keep it down any
longer. I detest Disneyfication. I detest Coca-Cola. I detest burgers. I
detest sentimental and violent Hollywood movies that tell lies about
history.’” Fitzgerald continues: “Europeans (I use the term loosely) see
themselves as vastly different from Americans, yet in some parts of the
world we are indistinguishable. It seems perverse, then, that
anti-Americanism is the only face of xenophobia still broadly accepted
in Europe. If, at a dinner party, you imitated the way Chinese people
speak, laughed about their stupidity, their ‘slitty eyes’ and their lack
of grace, you could safely expect never to be invited back. But no one
thinks twice about calling Americans dumb, fat and uncultured. How is it
acceptable for one superpower, but not the other, to be the object of
such derision?”

Of course it is acceptable because in China’s case, we are dealing with a
nonwhite, in many ways still-developing country that suffered at times
from Western colonialism; whereas in the American case, we have the
absolute core of all evils: Western, white, developed, (neo) colonial.
Add to this collection of negatives the fact that in contrast to its
West European counterparts (the dowagers Britain, Germany, France,
Italy, Spain who at least have the cultural panache and historical
legitimacy that somehow mitigate their colonial crimes) America is
perceived as a cultural parvenu, a crude newcomer, an unoriginal
usurper, an uncouth imitator. How often have both of us heard in our
daily conversations in the German-speaking world, uttered even by
admirers of the United States with no traces of any anti-American
feelings or attitudes, that America, fine place that it might be, was
simply not a Kulturnation or Kulturvolk and could never
attain such august status no matter how hard it tried, though perhaps
eminent in matters relating to technology. Simply put, America could
never attain any authenticity worthy of the name. Never having had any
nobility it could never attain being noble in the arts, tastes, manners,
always relegated to being commercial at best. “American culture” was an
oxymoron.

To be so reviled by left-liberal intellectuals, one needs to be both
politically and militarily powerful, but judged to be culturally
inferior, all of which the United States fulfils perfectly. Ditto with
Israel. By constructing the former as an all-powerful white colonizer,
it thus has become an acceptable object of derision and hatred at
left-liberal dinner parties. Not so for Jews—yet—who, by dint of the
Holocaust are still perceived as victims. Yet this “Holocaust pass” has
begun to fade as David Hirsh’s book Contemporary Left Antisemitism
so emphatically demonstrates. The fashionable anti-Zionist discourse
that has become de rigueur among trade unions, churches, left-liberal
parties, and social gatherings has entered a slippery slope towards
anti-Semitism which, of course, all its practitioners deny with
vehemence by accusing those holding this view as acting in open bad
faith, driven by their maniacal desire to cover up the magnitude of
Israel’s crimes, which must be enormous to merit such opprobrium.

Today the old 19th- and early-20th-century notion of Jewish power
pulling strings stealthily in America’s politics (Washington), its
economy and business (Wall Street) and its culture (Hollywood and the
East Coast intelligentsia) is widely shared well beyond extremes of the
left and the right. Add to this the postwar “Israel lobby,” and the
inextricable linkage between Israel/Jews and America becomes an
inevitable one.

Let us briefly look at some relevant data on this phenomenon by
mentioning some polls conducted by the Pew Research Center, which asks
its respondents on a regular basis whether they have favorable or
unfavorable views of the United States and of Jews. Although these items
do not comprise optimal measurements of anti-Semitism and
anti-Americanism since they do not cover the whole spectrum of relevant
resentments, they allow us to see rough estimates as to how closely
anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are intertwined. In 2016, for
example, the polls show that 53 percent of the French respondents who
had unfavorable views of Jews also had unfavorable views of the United
States. Negative attitudes toward the United States were also found
among 57 percent of the Germans who had reported unfavorable views of
Jews. The respective number for Greece was 68 percent, for Hungary 40
percent, for Italy 34 percent, for the Netherlands 50 percent, for
Poland 33 percent, for Spain 49 percent, for Sweden 51 percent, and for
Britain 41 percent. These numbers are even higher for countries like
Egypt (80 percent), Jordan (88 percent), Turkey (91 percent) Pakistan
(87 percent) or the Palestinian territories (82 percent) as a poll
conducted in 2011 shows. Since these are also countries in which Jews
are generally disliked (unfavorable ratings for Jews in these countries
reach over 95 percent) the prevalence of an anti-Semitic
anti-Americanism (or anti-American anti-Semitism) seems the rule rather
than the exception there.

In a study Beyer conducted together with Ulf Liebe he found that the
strong correlation between anti-Semitic and anti-American resentments
apparent in their German sample emanated from “functional similarities”
of the two objects of resentment: Both fulfill the function to
“rationalize social change.” Concretely, respondents feeling “uncertain”
about what the future will bring and resentful of the world “changing
too fast” as well as having generally negative views of “globalization”
reported higher anti-Semitic and anti-American attitudes than did the
rest of the sample. In yet another large-scale comparative study, Beyer
looked at the contemporary presence of anti-Semitism in 18 countries
(Brazil, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon,
Lithuania, Mexico, Pakistan, Poland, Russia, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine, the
United Kingdom, and the United States). While widely varied in its
respective country-specific manifestations, texture and intensities,
Beyer found that bringing to bear three of his many “independent
variables”—anti-Americanism, anti-globalization, and nationalism—the
impact of the anti-Americanism variable on anti-Semitism in each of
these countries was much higher and statistically significant than that
of anti-globalization and nationalism. Concretely: Anti-Semitic
attitudes were compellingly linked to anti-American ones.

In contrast to poll results, graffiti certainly do not allow us to draw
deep conclusions about the political zeitgeist and its ideological
peculiarities. Nonetheless, graffiti represent traces of public opinion
and mark a consciousness which might often still be unacceptable being
verbalized in public or to a researcher asking questions for a survey.
In a way, graffiti serve the same function as the anonymity of the
internet. They provide an unfiltered medium to voice what one harbors in
one’s heart and not what proper society expects one to say. The
presence of a graffito during the Iraq war in April 2004 at a Hamburg
subway station read Kerry ist auch Jude! (Kerry, too, is Jewish)
written over a Star of David in the middle of which the letters USA
appeared, omitted the anti-Israelism accompanying the anti-Americanism
of the graffito in Leipzig mentioned at the outset of our presentation.
(Kerry, of course, refers to John Kerry, the former secretary of state,
at the time U.S. senator from Massachusetts and a contestant for
becoming the Democratic Party’s candidate for the election to the
presidency of the United States later that fall.) The oft-invoked cover
of legitimate anti-Zionism for actual anti-Semitism was no longer needed
in this case. It was not for the first time that an American politician
had conveniently mutated into a Jew.

The myth that Jews, helped by their American masters or servants, rule
the world never disappeared. It merely lay dormant for a few decades in
the aftermath of the Holocaust, thus deviating from the norm of having
anti-Semitism be an integral and accepted part of public discourse.
Alas, there are many signs that the threshold of shame concerning
anti-Semitism has been substantially lowered. And its consistent link to
anti-Americanism makes this lowering so much easier and more socially
acceptable. Anti-Semitism’s association with America and thus to
ultimate power, makes invoking it an antinomian act of speaking truth to
power, which, in many circles on both sides of the Atlantic, is
inherently a good thing.

About Me

Jeff Weintraub is a social & political theorist, political sociologist, and democratic socialist who has been teaching most recently at the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr College, and the New School for Social Research, He was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University in 2015-2016 and a Research Associate at the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, Bryn Mawr College.
(Also an Affiliated Professor with the University of Haifa in Israel & an opponent of academic blacklists.)